Matt and I look at each other.
“Do the saints actually sleep in beds?” he asks me conversationally. “Or do you think they just sort of float around on clouds all the time…?”
“I hate you guys,” Jimmy mutters, spinning on his heel and slamming the door behind him.
Matty snickers, and I—
Fuck. I don’t just love him, I’m fucking in love with him, and it’s killing me.
Maybe he sees something on my face, because he gets that weird look on his again and grabs my arm and pulls me down the hall, away from Jimmy’s precious cone of silence, but instead of heading to some regular place we can hang out, he goes upstairs. The station’s an old-as-fuck brick building and the top floor isn’t wired up to code or something so it’s basically storage, and no one ever goes there except to send probies on bullshit wild goose chases.
Still, I don’t argue, because thank God he doesn’t have a brain tumor, but my pulse is right back to trying to win an Olympic gold in racing, just like it had been back before that split second when I’d thought that he did. He’s not saying a damn thing or turning on any lights, and I’m about to burst if I don’t get the lines of communication open here, so I wrack my brain for a safe topic as I follow him to wherever and whatever he’s got in mind.
“We should plan a party for Eden’s birthday, right?” I say just as we reach the top floor. “Maybe a surprise one, so she can’t get worried about it.”
“Good idea,” Matt says, opening a few doors like he’s looking for something in particular.
For real, I haven’t been up here for a couple of years at least, so I’ve got no clue what the game plan is right now, but the weirdness factor? It’s way, way too high between us for me to do anything but try to fill the silence in the hope of keeping myself sane until Matty drops whatever bomb he’s clearly ready to lob in my direction.
And I mean, Eden should have a party, you know? So it’s not like I’m just talking for the sake of talking. My feelings for her may not have the kind of years behind them as what’s eating me up about Matt, but sometimes when it’s right, it doesn’t take you all that long to figure it out, you know?
I never felt the way I feel about Eden about any other girl, and knowing Matty feels the same—I mean, I can’t untangle how I feel about each of them from how I feel about the other. Not that I’m mixing them up, I don’t mean that, but I mean… I don’t want her or him, I want her and him.
And I don’t just want them, I love them.
Like, I’m pretty damn sure it’s the forever kind.
So this business of her thinking she’s not going to live to see her birthday? Oh, hell to the no. First of all, that’s bullshit and I don’t care what’s happened in her family. Second, like Matty had said, time is gonna prove it’s bullshit, so we just gotta wait it out a few more weeks. And third, like I’m saying right now, once that happens, we need to celebrate and move the fuck forward. Help her see that she’s done some amazing things for twenty-five years, but that she can make a whole new list of amazing things to do for the next twenty-five, and the next after that, and maybe even the next after that.
And hopefully, if we play our cards right, she’ll be doing all those amazing things with us.
Because yeah, that’s the thing, I will get over this stuff inside me for Matt in trade for forever or however many years of it we get, and I’ll be thankful for it.
Before Eden, I always figured we’d eventually find other people and build separate lives, and I wasn’t really in a hurry to, you know? But how perfect is it that the girl it turns out we both want to build those lives with is the same girl, so we can just… you know, keep on keeping on?
Keep on, but become better, too?
Because Eden does that for us. Matty and I aren’t perfect by a long shot, but we’re good together, and we’re better than good with Eden in the mix, you know? She really does round us out, balance us and push us and inspire the shit out of us, and now that we’ve found her, I don’t want to give her up any more than I do him.
And as long as we can keep making this threesome thing work? I won’t have to give him up, maybe ever… even if I also don’t actually get to have him the way I want, maybe ever.
Probably ever.
Okay, fuck. I need to just face facts…
Ever, full stop.
Matt doesn’t want me that way and never will.
All of a sudden he snaps his fingers in front of my face, startling me right out of my personal pity party and right back to the here and now.
“Johnny, Jesus, what’s up with you?” he asks, his brows crinkled together. “Why’d you get so quiet?”
“What’s up with me? What’s up with you? What are we doing up here? Why were you getting so weird downstairs? Why wouldn’t you tell me if you had a fucking brain tumor?”
He rolls his eyes, which I can actually see him do now, because we’re in some cramped-ass storage room with old equipment and dusty-ass extra mattresses for the crash beds and a full wall of windows, and the streetlights are almost at eye-level here.
“I don’t have a brain tumor, why do you keep saying that?”
“Why are you shaking?” I ask to avoid answering.
Well, and also because he is, what the fuck? It’s the opposite of cold in here.
“I’m not shaking,” Matt flat-out lies, tucking his shaking hands in his pockets.
Then pulling them back out.
Then putting them behind his back.
Then crossing his arms over his chest and tucking them under his armpits.
Then—
“Jesus, Matty,” I snap, grabbing them and holding them in mine because he’s being ridiculous and they are shaking. “You are freaking me the fuck out, and if you need a kidney or something, just fucking say so.”
But he doesn’t.
He holds my hands right back, but tighter, and then leans right into me and kisses me.
Matty’s kissing me.
Matt’s…
I…
For a second, I’m blinded by that shaft of golden light and all the choir-of-angels bullshit, and I can’t move. Then he releases the death grip he’s got on my hands and replaces it with a death grip on my hips, shoving me back against one of those equipment lockers and pinning me there—all hot mouth and aggressive tongue and get-my-dick-hard urgency—and I get it together fast.
Matty’s fucking kissing me, and even if this all just ends up being his way of telling me he needs that kidney after all, I’m not going to waste a single second of it.
I grab him right back, one hand on his ass and the other locked around the back of his skull to hold us together, and I fucking devour him.
Drink him in like a starving man.
Revel in the fucking moment. Bask in it. Savor it.
I’ve wanted this for so long it’s almost making me dizzy, finally getting to touch him.
Taste him.
Feel his hands on me—strong and demanding and insistent as fuck, as if against all odds, he’s desperate for it, too.
That kiss goes on for fucking ever, and hand to God, I’m so lost in him that I’m not sure I’d even notice if the bunker lights and bell went off. Matty’s grinding against me, taking my mouth like he owns it—his cock just as hard as mine—and fuck if the way he’s working me over isn’t going to make me shoot right here in my pants.
Especially when he finally rips his mouth off mine and yanks my head back, sucking on my neck as he ruts against me.
I groan, tightening my grip on him.
Jesus, I want this. Want him so bad I’m crazy with it. And Matty? He’s gasping, shaking, pressing that hot mouth against me over and over, like he wants to brand me.
I’m so far gone in the moment it takes me a minute to figure out he’s also talking.
“You don’t hate me?” he mumbles against my fevered skin. “This… this okay, Johnny? You don’t hate me?”
What the fuck?
I push him
away, which my dick doesn’t like one bit, and repeat it out loud. “What the fuck, Matty? Hate you? How could I hate you? I fucking love you.”
He stares at me, lips swollen and pupils blown and whisker burn already pinking him up, and I want to fucking pinch myself. I want to dive right back into what we were just doing. I want him to fucking say something, because of course I know he knows I love him, but not sure if he knew I loved him, too, if you know what I mean.
But Jesus, I do. I really do.
He’s still staring at me, somber and serious like he wasn’t just trying to suck my face off, and finally I see him swallow, and his voice all gritty and tight, he tells me—
“Johnny, I think I’m gay.”
I blink.
Then I look down at where his dick is still trying to rip its way out of his shorts to make friends with mine, and I snicker.
He punches me in the shoulder, hard. “Johnny, I’m serious.”
“You’re not gay, bro,” I tell him, because hello, Eden. Bi for the win, yo. But before I can get that part out, he grabs my cock and squeezes it, making my entire world shut down as I lurch into him and send us both tumbling down onto one of those dusty-ass old mattresses that should’ve been thrown out, not stored up here like the health hazard they are.
I instantly start coughing like a maniac because I’m seriously choking to death on the clouds of dust that engulf us, but air? Lungs? Both are secondary, because even while I’m asphyxiating here, Matty keeps hold of my dick and rolls with me so we land together.
And I shit you not, I will gladly choke to death right here and now if it means he keeps touching me like this.
Hands all over me like he can’t get enough.
Rolling me under him because he’s always been a bossy fuck in the bedroom and guess suddenly wanting some D doesn’t change that, despite the fact that I’ve got three inches and about twenty pounds on him and could pin and hold him easily if I wanted to.
Well, okay, maybe not easily, but just sayin’.
I don’t want to, though. Matt can fucking own me for all I care. He can have any fucking thing he wants right now, because now he’s yelling at me, grinding down on me again, turning me so far past on that I’m going to fucking burst as he tries to convince me of something that he should know me well enough to figure out that I am one hundred percent okay with.
One hundred and ten percent.
A million percent.
“I am gay, Johnny,” he says, using that gimpy cast-less arm to trap my wrists over my head like he thinks I’m actually going to try to get away. His left hand fumbles between us, on my dick, on his dick, working them together right through our fucking shorts as he pants out his words in my face. “I fucking want you right now. Don’t… don’t want to ruin us, but Jesus, bro, I can’t stop thinking about it. Can’t stop imagining this shit. I want… want… Johnny, fuck.”
Got my legs around him and flipped him—thank you, four years of high-school wrestling.
I grin down at him. “Dude, I’m all yours,” I tell him, doing him a solid and pulling his dick out just to be clear.
And fuck, do I ever love his dick. Right now it’s practically combusting in my hand, thick and throbbing and with that fat pink head fully exposed, jutting out of his foreskin and pouring out precum like a fucking fire hydrant with its cap off.
I start stroking him off, and he practically comes apart.
“Johnny, Jesus, I… fuck… fuck.”
He’s panting, thrusting into my hand and clawing at the mattress and thrashing about underneath me, and it’s like riding a bucking bronco. If I had any patience whatsoever I’d pause and get our clothes off and ride him for real. Or flip him over and top the shit out of him. Or take him in my mouth like I’ve been wanting to since fucking forev—
“I… I talked to Asher,” he grits out, hands digging into my thighs as he drives that gorgeous cock through my fist.
I’ve got my hand on his cock and he’s talking about the new guy?
“Fuck Asher,” I tell him sincerely, my hand going still.
Why the fuck is he talking about Asher?
“Fuck Asher?” he repeats, getting an evil glint in his eye that makes me want to sit up and beg. “I don’t want to fuck Asher.”
My mouth goes dry. Matty wants—
He uses my moment of inattention to flip me back over and reverse our positions, the little shit. And how he got my shorts down with that move I do not know, but skin-to-skin frottage?
I… can’t… see straight.
“Nnnnnnngh,” is all I manage, arching up against him and not minding one single bit that he’s got my wrists pinned again like the bossy fuck he is.
“I… don’t… want… to… fuck… Asher,” he repeats, rocking against me. Mouth on my throat again. All that hard muscle and aggressive power grinding me into the mattress until I can’t think and don’t want to, I just want this.
Forever, this.
Although oh fucking God, right now? I also want to come.
Desperately.
“Want to… want to… want to fuck you,” Matty’s going on, like he needs to convince me. “Love you. Love you, too, Johnny. I need… I need… need—”
“Matty,” I gasp, bucking up against him when those words send me right to the edge. “Fuck, fuck. Matty.”
I jerk one hand out of his grasp—thank you, gimpy right arm of his—and wedge it between us, wrapping it around our dicks as he thrusts against me, and that’s it. My whole world explodes.
“Fuck,” he growls, burying his face against the side of my neck. “Johnny… oh fuck.”
He shudders on top of me, heat spilling between us as the nuclear fusion lightning strike of my orgasm locks me in its grip.
“Jesus,” I gasp, every muscle in my body seizing up as I come and come and come, shaking underneath him. “Matt.”
It’s endless.
It’s hot as fuck.
It’s Matt, and he’s coming, too, still rutting on top of me as he grinds out every drop, pleasure-overloading my sensitized dick as he does his best to crush me into the mattress, still saying all these things that I never fucking believed I’d hear from him.
He wants me.
He loves me.
He’s just rocked my fucking world, and the only thing keeping me from wanting to die happy right here and now is that promise he sort of made when we were in the middle of it.
Matty wants to fuck me, and the truth is, I’ve never bottomed before, but for him?
Anything.
Any fucking thing at all.
And the way things are going, looks like that anything might just turn out to be everything, and everything… well, that’s one of those words like forever, you know? One of those words I’ve started thinking a lot about ever since meeting Eden.
Those words that only sound right when they include Matt, too.
20
Eden
“Mrs. Blumenhall’s hair looks lovely, Eden,” Janet, another CNA says as I pass her on my way out to the nursing home’s deserted balcony.
“Thanks,” I say, grinning at her. “We decided to try and recreate the hairstyle from her wedding photo.”
Janet winks. “You ever get tired of this career, you’ve got it made as a hairdresser, then.”
I laugh, but it’s bittersweet, and once the sliding doors close behind me, I lean against the balcony’s rail and sigh. I’ve got a fifteen-minute break from my “career” as a CNA, and while a part of me loves being able to put a smile on someone like Mrs. Blumenhall’s face—and I know that caring for her basic needs does matter—another part of me is full of a growing dissatisfaction with how little I’m really doing as a CNA.
Nursing school.
My twenty-fifth birthday is barreling down on me, and yet I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe it’s the boys. Being with Johnny and Matt has made me feel so many things, and I’d be lying if I said a lot of those things didn’t include yearning for a future I alwa
ys thought I didn’t have.
A future I still think I don’t have.
The truth is, I’m scared. I want it so bad now—want to stay alive and have them both and become a nurse and start a whole new bucket list—but every time I try to look at it objectively, to set my fears aside and see if I can really let myself believe that following in my mother’s footsteps isn’t my fate, despite generations of proof otherwise, I get terrified for a whole new set of reasons.
We agreed I’d live with them until Matt got his cast off. Well, now it’s off, and no one’s mentioned anything about me leaving… but that still doesn’t mean they want me to stay forever.
And if they did, because oh, the way they treat me—no one’s ever said the words, but I’ve never felt so loved—how would that work out anyway? In the real world, long-term, three people can’t just… just… shack up, right? I’ve never heard of it, anyway, and I’m pretty sure doing it would mean getting stuck with all sorts of nasty labels.
And even if we managed to do all of that… would it really be fair to them? Johnny’s in love with Matt, and hopefully, one day he’ll have the guts to tell him. Because Matt? I think it’s there, too. I get that he has a whole bunch of stuff in his head that he probably still has to work out, but he’s been opening up so beautifully with his dad over the past month, and he and Johnny are so close, I really do think he’ll open his eyes to what’s right in front of him, eventually.
But if I’m there? Maybe not.
Maybe I would mess it up for the two of them, the way I’d been afraid of in the beginning.
A warm breeze ruffles my hair as I stare out at the pretty landscaping around the nursing home, giving me a slight respite from the late-summer humidity, and I don’t even realize I have my phone in my hand until I’m already dialing. It’s instinct I guess, seeking comfort from the one constant in my life, and even though I haven’t even taken a moment to calculate the time-zone difference and figure out if she might be available, my Auntie Maria answers on the first ring.
“Eden, my sugar,” she gushes, just as happy to hear from me as always. “You’ve made my day!”
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